Movies cost a lot of money and they make a lot of money back. People love seeing movies and they don’t mind paying, even with ticket prices increasing each year. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a little angering when you realize just how much money pushes through these companies. All the same, let’s take a look. Now, I wanted to wait as long as possible to make this list because there are always blockbusters released in December that don’t have time to accumulate as large a box office. Usually December films are just included in the next year’s totals, so we’ll treat them as such here with a quick reference to them at the end. Disclaimer – all facts and figures for this article come from BoxOfficeMojo.com. Continue Reading
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
All posts tagged Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
1) There is such a thing. Cool, right?
2) They were recently held for the 2010-ish year of cinema.
There aren’t a ton of awards. It’s more a cool way to end the annual Ghent International Film Festival. However, one of our favorite composers Hans Zimmer received Best Original Film Score of the Year for Inception, an award he very much deserved. As a reminder, 
Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard were rudely and scandalously disqualified from all competition for 2008′s The Dark Knight due to having credited some of their associates for helping come up with pieces of the score (the Academy determined too many composers had worked on it for it to be eligible – utterly stupid, considering the other four composers all admitted Zimmer and Howard came up with 90+% of it and that it’s common practice to bring others into the process). Hopefully the same ridiculousness won’t happen for The Dark Knight Rises, on which he is sole composer.
Randy Newman won Best Original Song written for Film for “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3. Alexander Desplat, who most will know from his work on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 & 2 won Film Composer of the Year for the third year in a row. He also scored The King’s Speech and is apparently more awesome than most moviegoers realize.
Check out the press release here.
Finishing up my analysis of the importance of female characters in this past summer’s slate of releases, we’ll look at the opposite end of the spectrum, where they were crucial, if not the crux, of the story.
X-Men: First Class – Not all films suffered from female characters put there because there has to be a female character. January Jones as Emma Frost was chilling and made you want more. Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, serves as an important thematic development as Raven. First Class is not just about superhero action but also these characters coming to terms with their mutations and learning to accept them, and in turn themselves. This idea manifests itself most strongly in Raven. Her character is a crucial pendulum in the relationship of Charles and Erik, as here she sides with Charles but by the end has joined Erik. Both Jones and Lawrence perform strongly in their respective roles.
